I know how love feels when you have it toward another person. I also know how it feels to lose that love and the empty feeling that loss leaves behind. Love in my opinion is something in the mind that causes a chemical to be released that is felt in the heart of a person that can cause a sense of well being and therefore enjoyment. I like the comment about it taking oceans of volumes to describe what love is. Love is difficult to come by unless you have that certain other that understands it and chooses to share theirs with you. Real love is loving someone everyday no matter what. That too is difficult to find.

Now listen, folks … just look at Love as "feeling". Don’t dogmatize, lecture or pontificate about Love. You will look so narrow-minded, pitiable, dismal and pathetic. People love to hate, because they hate to love. In "feeling", you can see that in itself, Love is contradictory. I think that’s what BrutusEctors means – you cannot put a finger on Love. In Macbeth, Shakespeare described love of a lover as a dagger in the back. Now, how can Love and Murder be one at the same time? The love of war, and the love of peace, is in Tolstoy’s War And Peace. If you read Tolstoy, did you figure it out?

Happy Valentine’s Day! But no dagger in the back, please. Enjoy your day. JV

Brutus, your wisdom lifted up the shade out of this article for us to discover how infinite Love is. Narrow or limited views about Love, especially coming from the "lunatic fringe" are sore eyes to read, but you just explained that "Love" could be anything under the sun. I am relieved.

A person loving another, which is the centerpiece of this article, is just a drop from out of an ocean of meanings what love is. And the whole penumbra of how you describe it, is the size of the Pacific and Atlantic oceans itself that won’t fit any written dictionary ever known to Man yet.

Love of animals, of self, love of country, this passion to love and hate someone or anything; terrorists love to destroy the Government, the State, and so are the love of their accomplices towards terrorists as they coddle them like a mother would coddle a baby close to her bosom, etc. You can name any being or matter as the subject of love or the object of being loved. And you can use all the adjectives in the dictionary to describe love – selfishness or selflessness is just one of them.

Seems to me that the word "love" has been misused, reshaped, taken out of context, etc., all over the place. True love is a "self-mutual" thing, where one has combined himself with another so entirely (in mind and spirit, that is) that the other is worth as much as, or more, than the one's self. These days, love is a selfish thing, a thing where you satisfy the other simply because doing so satisfies yourself in some way.